


These Are Your Shoes

by atti (attilatehbun)



Category: Young Avengers
Genre: M/M, old fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-23
Updated: 2013-07-23
Packaged: 2017-12-21 04:04:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/895560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/attilatehbun/pseuds/atti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Billy and Teddy live in each other's pockets, basically.</p>
            </blockquote>





	These Are Your Shoes

**Author's Note:**

> originally posted 3.10 
> 
> From the prompt: "I know you better than you want me to/Inside your pockets and walking in your shoes" Give a Little Love by Rilo Kiley
> 
> Bubbe Kaplan graciously borrowed from [Mici](http://archiveofourown.org/users/noharlembeat/pseuds/Mici)

::

"Billy, I--" Teddy swallows. "I think those are mine."

Billy looks down at himself, movements bleary with sleep, pats his narrow hips. His thumb stops near the waistband of Teddy's boxers. "Oh," he says, clueless, "are they?" He looks up at Teddy, not awake, not getting it. "D'you want me to--"

Teddy can't even get out the strangled sound his throat wants to make before he's piling Billy into the bed, pressing his face tight to Billy's ribs.

~

Billy is doing something complicated with his hands. Something complicated - wriggly - and obviously not clear enough, if Eli and Cassie's drawn in eyebrows are anything to go by. Teddy covers his mouth with the inside of his wrist and tries desperately not to look like he's choking on his own giggles, because if he does then Kate will start up with the side-poking. Kate is scary good at poking, those jabs _hurt_ , and Billy must have divulged all of Teddy's most ticklish spots because Kate unfailingly zeros in on them with perfect accuracy.

But it is hard as hell to stifle his laughter. Billy's face is tightening up; he's letting out these little choked sounds of frustration at having to keep his words in, back behind his teeth. Eli's face is approaching _purple_ as he shouts guesses, and he looks a little like he wants to just grab Billy and shake the answer out of him. Cassie has completely given up and is now just calling out random words, apparently hoping to accidentally stumble onto the the right phrase to end this game once and for all.

And oh-oh _god_ , now Billy's got his hips in on the action, sort of twitchy and even more obfuscating, and it is _so_ good that Jonas calmly announces "Time" because Teddy can't hold it in any longer. One more second and he would be clutching a pillow to his face and falling sideways into Kate's shoulder, trying to remember to breathe.

Words are still beyond Billy's abilities, prevented escape so long they've clogged. He throws his hands up with a strangled " _Aggggggh_ " and collapses/sits on the floor, _thump_.

"The fuck was that, bro?" Tommy laughs from behind the couch. He receives a middle finger and a glare for his trouble.

Teddy can feel the tears streaming down his face, he can barely stop laughing long enough to get oxygen into lungs to reply. "It was... _library card_ ," he hiccups out, finally. (And _there's_ the poking.)

" _Thank_ you," Billy huffs and flops dramatically backwards the rest of the way to the floor.

Five blankly exasperated faces turn towards Teddy as one and he swallows his last snicker.

" _Obviously_ ," he says with a shrug.

~

Billy is lucky to be in the air. Teddy doesn't think this, he _knows_ this. Billy is in the air, surrounded by nothing but wind and openness, while Teddy is being swarmed on the ground. Like, _literally_. There seem to be thousands of these damn bugs (or at lease, things that _look_ like bugs, hard and shiny, scuttling), all of them swarming. The largest ones are nearly a foot long and every time they click their pinchers Teddy feels an answering shiver down his spine.

(And what a fucking appropriate New York problem. Giant freaking cockroaches. Okay. Great. _Perfect_.)

There is mass swarming. All over Teddy, and they don't seem to be stopping. He manages to yank a couple of them off and sort of crush them in his fists , but they are still determinedly clicking their pinchers and twitching their legs, even half smashed, and they don't exactly want to come off so easy.

"Are they even _alive_?" he shouts to Tommy, off somewhere to his right, presumably getting buried in a swarm of his own.

"No fucking clue," Tommy shouts back, his voice reedy and rushed, like he's speed-shuddering in an attempt to shake the bugs off. "I mean, they explode and all, but they don't explode _right_ , know what I mean?"

Teddy has absolutely no idea what Tommy means, but then, he's not nearly as in love with all things explosive as Tommy is, and really, he doesn't have the spare mental capacity to puzzle it out right now. He does not want to be on the ground. He wants the bug-things to _stop moving_ when he hits them. He wants them to go back to whereverthefuck they came from. But he doesn't have any of that. Quite frankly, he doesn't have a much of anything going for him right now. About the only thing in his favor, here, alone on the ground with a speedster who can't even use his speed, is that the roach-things are clearly drawn towards powered people, almost like they can smell it with their grotesquely twitching antennae, so all the civilians were able to get out and away without much issue.

One of the smaller bug-things scampers up Teddy's neck and he flinches away just before it starts investigating his ear. _God_ he wants to get off the ground. But they weren't exactly planning on _patrolling_ when they left the apartment, much less walking into an actual _fight_ , and the bugs came out of nowhere and Teddy is just. not. wearing his costume. He debates shifting to Hulkling, making some wings without the uniform, but the last time he shifted without it he ended up so close to naked that he had to fly up above the cloud cover the whole way home, just to avoid being splashed across the front page of the _Bugle_. The thought of these things being on him in that state is just... _no_.

Teddy throws a few more bugs off him, _hard_ , hoping for at least a small splat when they collide with a tree, and tries to remember to take steady, even breaths through his nose. Suddenly, a cross-directional gust of wind ruffles through his hair and strong, skinny fingers close around his forearm.

Billy.

Teddy grins and wraps his own hand around Billy's forearm. Half a beat later, his feet are lifting off and Billy is smirking down at him.

"Looked like you could use a rescue," Billy says.

"My hero," Teddy replies, batting his eyelashes at Billy as they move up and away.

Billy rolls his eyes. "I _will_ drop you," he says.

Teddy flexes the hand on Billy's arm, just a little, and kicks an insectoid hanger-on off his ankle. "Seriously," Teddy says, " _Thank you_." He squeezes Billy's arm again and wills the hair on the back of his neck not to stand up.

"Yeah well," Billy says, awkward again, "I've seen you with the roaches in the kitchen."

Teddy wrinkles his nose. "I hope you've got a plan," he says, "because unlike the kitchen roaches, hitting these things doesn't work. And I'm using something much bigger than a newspaper."

"Well I--" Billy starts, but before he can finish Tommy is yelling up at them from the ground.

"When you're done with the pillow talk, I'm kind of getting overrun down here," Tommy yells. "So, you know, no rush or anything."

Billy mutters, "There isn't even a _pillow_ ," as they swoop down, and Teddy chuckles in his ear, grabbing a fistful of Tommy's shirt to jerk him out of the mess.

~

"Billy, that is not helping."

"I'm not even doing anything."

"Just because I can't see you doesn't mean I can't _tell_."

~

Billy says he doesn't know why he fasts. Maybe it's true. Maybe he doesn't know. Maybe he hasn't examined it, not really, because on top of everything else, all the other bullshit that's going on, it's just not something worth looking at. He fasts for one day, that's the end of it.

But Teddy is pretty sure he knows, even if Billy doesn't. Because maybe. Maybe when your identity has been shaken on such a fundamental level, it grows a part of you that wants to cling to everything that's been yours up until now. Maybe that part is hard to ignore, even as the rest of you throws yourself into all the trappings of the something new. It's an instinct Teddy recognizes all too well.

So yeah, maybe Billy's not really that observant, has never _been_ particularly observant, but today fasting is something that is familiar, and that makes it important.

It also has interesting side effects. (Besides the complaining. That's hardly a unique occurrence. A Billy without complaining is like a penguin that can fly. Something that is just wrong to even contemplate.)

Billy groans as he hangs up the phone and flops face forward into the bed. Teddy doesn't even ask, he just drops down next to him and rubs his thumb behind Billy's ear.

Billy says something into the pillow and Teddy translates the muffles sounds as _Bubbe invited us to her Break the Fast_.

Teddy rolls his eyes and tweaks Billy's ear. "That is really not so bad, Bill."

Billy makes another series of noises. _You have never been to a Kaplan Event_.

Even muffled, Teddy can hear the capital letter. He simply snorts.

More garbled sounds and something that sounds like a choke. _There will be **cousins**_.

Teddy leans down, rests his head between Billy's shoulder blades. "Billy..." he starts, placating.

The noises Billy makes this time are more whine than syllable - he even kicks his feet a little - and Teddy's face goes pale.

" _Matching sweaters_?" Teddy says, horrified. Billy nods. "But that's just-- It's-- With _what_ on them?"

Billy lets out one final hilarious choked off sob, performs an aborted full-body flail, and seizes Teddy's pillow to cover the other side of his head.

"No, you're right," Teddy says, stunned. "We are definitely staying here."

~

Billy only startles once when Teddy raps on the window, but Teddy barely notices. Teddy is focused on other things. Teddy is just proud of himself for not putting his whole fist through the glass.

Billy raises the sash and steps back with a raised eyebrow as Teddy folds his body through the narrow space and reabsorbs his wings.

"You know, T, this building has stairs," Billy says. "Sure, no elevator, but we're only on the second floor, I would think it's not _that_ big of an inconvenience as would necessitate _flight_."

Teddy doesn't say anything, just throws his bag in the direction of the chair. Of course, he's not as careful as he was with the window and the chair back and seat separate from each other in a shower of splinters and puffs of upholstery.

"I could be wrong?" Billy says. A second later there's a flare of blue behind Teddy as the chair reconstitutes itself. "What happened?"

Teddy's voice is completely gone, buried somewhere down deep inside him, tied up in a knot. He can feel how stiff his shoulders are; he tries rolling them a little. It almost approximates a shrug.

"Well, you don't seem to be bleeding," Billy says, "and you aren't pulling me out the window to go save the day, so." Suddenly Billy is right in front of him, ducking under his arm and around to get right into his face. Teddy tries to look away, but Billy is lightning quick sometimes and he's got his hands on Teddy's face before Teddy can even start to move. Maybe the tightness in his body is slowing him down.

When Billy finally finds Teddy's eyes, his whole face goes soft. "Oh," he says, quiet, and _fuck_ but Teddy thought his face was more under control than that. He clenches his jaw, more tightness to add to everything else.

Billy tries again. "You only, only when you see--" And just like that, the tension starts transferring into Billy's body, the tendons in his neck standing out and his chest swelling. "Where?" Billy says. "How? _What did he say_?"

And just like that, it's all gone. Teddy rubs at his forehead, suddenly so tired. "It's not--" he tries.

"Yeah, but, it _is_ , though, if Greg can't let this shit lie, even now," Billy says, softer this time, cupping the back of Teddy's neck.

"I should be able..." The rest catches in his throat. He's got some of his words back, just not the ones that _matter_.

"Teddy, it's okay that you can't ignore it," Billy says and brings Teddy's eyes back to his. "Teddy, it's _okay_."

Teddy clutches at the back of Billy's shirt, just a little. Billy pulls him in closer and huffs in his ear. "Fine, I won't go find him and zap him in the ass with lightning," he says. "But I make no promises if I see him on the street accidentally."

And that, Teddy supposes, is all he needs.

~

Billy tears at his hair and paces around the tiny room. "How am I supposed to do this?" he cries. "I can't be in two places at once!"

Teddy reaches out and stills the bulk of his tremors with a hand on his hip. He pulls Billy in between his knees and pokes at him. "Actually, you kind of can, Billy."

Billy stares blankly down at him and it's all Teddy can do to not give him a Look. Billy waits, clearly expecting more than that, and after a beat Teddy slowly shifts until he's Billy, staring back at Billy.

It's not the first time Teddy's had to take on Billy's appearance, but Billy's jaw gapes just the same.

"It never stops being weird that you can do that," he says finally.

"Yeah, well, it'll work. It's worked before," Teddy shrugs.

"On my _mom_. For five minutes. And a little bit the media," Billy says. "This might actually get us caught."

Now Teddy can't stop the Look, not even a little, but it seems to be the right move, because it's _Billy's_ look on _Billy's_ face and it is apparently convincing. Just to cement things, Teddy gets up and paces the room, tearing at his hair. "How am I supposed to do this?" he mimics.

Billy sits with a grunt and crosses his arms. "Fine. Okay. I believe you can do it. Do I even want to know how you're so good at that?"

Teddy shrugs the same way Billy would. "Well I mean. I do kind of know you."

::fin::


End file.
